For a country that talks a big game about data privacy and protection, a whole lot of government information that ought not to have seen the light of day has just been made public.
On Friday at 3:35 pm, deadline expired for the Berlin government to pay the ransom, and the group that hacked into the internal systems of the Berlin Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and the Environment back in August with a single well-placed phishing email released a large chunk of their 5.79 TB of stolen data to the public.
HEIST is a worker-owned online magazine, founded by writers and editors who after years working across Berlin's media landscape believed something essential was missing.
Anyone living here has felt a growing gap between the city as it actually is and the version being served up by mainstream outlets. We experienced that disconnect firsthand. We saw political censorship shape coverage decisions and felt the weight of billionaire ownership land directly on our work. It reached a point where we could either keep going along with it, or try to build something better.
That's why we created HEIST.
And look at you: scrolling, clicking, squinting at blurred text just to get a little further. If you'll go to that much effort to read HEIST, you can surely give us one email. That's the whole price, and the rest of the story is right behind it.
Real journalism costs money. We commission the hard-hitting, well-reported, long-form work everyone wants to read but nobody seems to publish anymore.
The future of this city is still in the balance. We intend to be part of that struggle. We hope that you'll join us.
